Man and Wife, Wilkie Collins [best ebook reader android .TXT] 📗

something else. Of what? Of something worth thinking of, this time⁠—of filling another pipe.

He took out his tobacco-pouch; and suddenly suspended operations at the moment of opening it.

What was the object he saw, on the other side of a row of dwarf pear-trees, away to the right? A woman⁠—evidently a servant by her dress⁠—stooping down with her back to him, gathering something: herbs they looked like, as well as he could make them out at the distance.

What was that thing hanging by a string at the woman’s side? A slate? Yes. What the deuce did she want with a slate at her side? He was in search of something to divert his mind⁠—and here it was found. “Anything will do for me,” he thought. “Suppose I ‘chaff’ her a little about her slate?”

He called to the woman across the pear-trees. “Hullo!”

The woman raised herself, and advanced toward him slowly⁠—looking at him, as she came on, with the sunken eyes, the sorrow-stricken face, the stony tranquillity of Hester Dethridge.

Geoffrey was staggered. He had not bargained for exchanging the dullest producible vulgarities of human speech (called in the language of slang, “Chaff”) with such a woman as this.

“What’s that slate for?” he asked, not knowing what else to say, to begin with.

The woman lifted her hand to her lips⁠—touched them⁠—and shook her head.

“Dumb?”

The woman bowed her head.

“Who are you?”

The woman wrote on her slate, and handed it to him over the pear-trees. He read:⁠—“I am the cook.”

“Well, cook, were you born dumb?”

The woman shook her head.

“What struck you dumb?”

The woman wrote on her slate:⁠—“A blow.”

“Who gave you the blow?”

She shook her head.

“Won’t you tell me?”

She shook her head again.

Her eyes had rested on his face while he was questioning her; staring at him, cold, dull, and changeless as the eyes of a corpse. Firm as his nerves were⁠—dense as he was, on all ordinary occasions, to anything in the shape of an imaginative impression⁠—the eyes of the dumb cook slowly penetrated him with a stealthy inner chill. Something crept at the marrow of his back, and shuddered under the roots of his hair. He felt a sudden impulse to get away from her. It was simple enough; he had only to say good morning, and go on. He did say good morning⁠—but he never moved. He put his hand into his pocket, and offered her some money, as a way of making her go. She stretched out her hand across the pear-trees to take it⁠—and stopped abruptly, with her arm suspended in the air. A sinister change passed over the deathlike tranquillity of her face. Her closed lips slowly dropped apart. Her dull eyes slowly dilated; looked away, sideways, from his eyes; stopped again; and stared, rigid and glittering, over his shoulder⁠—stared as if they saw a sight of horror behind him. “What the devil are you looking at?” he asked⁠—and turned round quickly, with a start. There was neither person nor thing to be seen behind him. He turned back again to the woman. The woman had left him, under the influence of some sudden panic. She was hurrying away from him⁠—running, old as she was⁠—flying the sight of him, as if the sight of him was the pestilence.

“Mad!” he thought⁠—and turned his back on the sight of her.

He found himself (hardly knowing how he had got there) under the walnut-tree once more. In a few minutes his hardy nerves had recovered themselves⁠—he could laugh over the remembrance of the strange impression that had been produced on him. “Frightened for the first time in my life,” he thought⁠—“and that by an old woman! It’s time I went into training again, when things have come to this!”

He looked at his watch. It was close on the luncheon hour up at the house; and he had not decided yet what to do about his letter to Anne. He resolved to decide, then and there.

The woman⁠—the dumb woman, with the stony face and the horrid eyes⁠—reappeared in his thoughts, and got in the way of his decision. Pooh! some crazed old servant, who might once have been cook; who was kept out of charity now. Nothing more important than that. No more of her! no more of her!

He laid himself down on the grass, and gave his mind to the serious question. How to address Anne as “Mrs. Arnold Brinkworth?” and how to make sure of her receiving the letter?

The dumb old woman got in his way again.

He closed his eyes impatiently, and tried to shut her out in a darkness of his own making.

The woman showed herself through the darkness. He saw her, as if he had just asked her a question, writing on her slate. What she wrote he failed to make out. It was all over in an instant. He started up, with a feeling of astonishment at himself⁠—and, at the same moment his brain cleared with the suddenness of a flash of light. He saw his way, without a conscious effort on his own part, through the difficulty that had troubled him. Two envelopes, of course: an inner one, unsealed, and addressed to “Mrs. Arnold Brinkworth;” an outer one, sealed, and addressed to “Mrs. Silvester:” and there was the problem solved! Surely the simplest problem that had ever puzzled a stupid head.

Why had he not seen it before? Impossible to say.

How came he to have seen it now?

The dumb old woman reappeared in his thoughts⁠—as if the answer to the question lay in something connected with her.

He became alarmed about himself, for the first time in his life. Had this persistent impression, produced by nothing but a crazy old woman, anything to do with the broken health which the surgeon had talked about? Was his head on the turn? Or had he smoked too much on an empty stomach, and gone too long (after traveling all night) without his customary drink of ale?

He left the garden to put that latter theory to the test forthwith. The betting would have gone dead against him